A performance evaluation method for WSNs security

The amount of Wireless Sensor Network applications requiring security is getting higher and higher and also developers that are not security experts are often required to secure their applications. Many times they do it without any consciousness of the security performance trade-off arisen by this operation.In this paper we present a method for performance evaluation of a modular security architecture for WSNs. Our method evaluates the costs that have to be paid when introducing security, in terms of memory occupancy, network performance and energy consumption. Knowing these indexes leads to awareness of security costs and helps in fine tuning of security performance trade-offs. A designer may apply our method to know the impact on performance of the security modules he needs. Also, we present performance data collected by applying our method on the implementation of PLASA, a modular security architecture we have designed and evaluated.